Letters and photos from Beatles’ early days to go on show in Hamburg
Exclusive: The collection, including donations from Paul McCartney’s brother Mike, shows band’s development in early 60s
A rare set of letters and photos from the early days of the Beatles, in which they write about feeling like stars for the first time, is to go on display in Hamburg.
The collection, from an influential period when the band lived in the German city, includes the only letter in existence with words from both Paul McCartney and John Lennon, which was written to the bassist’s brother, Mike McCartney.
The free exhibition, which runs from 8 to 25 May and is part of Hamburg’s annual port festival, Hafengeburtstag, revolves around the original five members of the band during a period that massively shaped their sound and look between 1960 and 62.
Mike McCartney, who donated some of the letters to the collection put together by the Liverpool city region combined authority and the Hamburg senate, said: “It’s fascinating, because they [give] you so many secrets about them as they are developing.”
“It was quite extraordinary, because our kid is just saying what’s happening there in a foreign land, over the water. And it was a very important stage in their development,” Mike told the Guardian.
The letters, also gathered from The Cavern Club and the Liverpool Beatles Museum, reveal the thoughts of Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, as well as those of the original bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe, who died shortly after the Hamburg period from a brain haemorrhage at the age of 21, and the original drummer, Pete Best, who was hired specifically for their first visit to Hamburg.
In a letter from Best to his mother, he recalls how he, Lennon and McCartney felt like stars boarding their plane, having been interviewed by a member of the press about them being voted Liverpool’s number one band.
Photographs taken by Sutcliffe, who was instrumental in the band’s style – and was the first to have the band’s moptop hairstyle, given to him by his fiancee, Astrid Kirchherr – also feature in the exhibition. He decided to stay in Hamburg with Kirchherr while the other bandmates returned to Liverpool.
Mike McCartney said the Beatles did shows “non-stop” during their time in Hamburg, famously performing for eight hours some evenings. “They were on all these pills to keep them going, uppers and downers,” he said. When Paul returned from Hamburg, he was noticeably thinner, Mike said, but it was clear the band had gone to the next level.
“The music when they then played around Liverpool – by god, could you hear the professionalism. The difference was that they had come out of Hamburg, done the hard work – I mean, more than hard work. It was like they were like chalk and cheese when they came back to Liverpool. And they were just out and out the top group in Liverpool, because they were so together, so united, so different.”
One letter from Paul to Mike, written in May 1962, gives an insight into Hamburg’s flourishing live music scene, with Paul revealing how they had been told that the American rock’n’roll legends Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis could soon be visiting the city, and how Paul hoped the Beatles could perform with Berry.
It also features a lengthy passage from Lennon, dictated to his bandmate, which starts with a whimsical poem about keeping your chin up and commiserates with Mike for not getting a job as a hairdresser, without knowing if he actually got it or not, and goes on for several pages, with characters such as Jesus and the F1 driver Stirling Moss all making an appearance.
Liverpool Combined Authority said it was potentially looking at bringing the exhibition home in the future, after a BBC six-part series being filmed in Hamburg looking at the Beatles’ early days.
Mike said he had not kept the letters for any particular reason initially, and that he “didn’t even realise their significance” until very recently. His wife had called him a hoarder for keeping these items for more than 60 years, he said. “But I’m glad that I did, to a certain extent. Because if I hadn’t hoarded, then you wouldn’t have these unique letters.”
Mike was also a musician, in the band the Scaffold, which has a box set of singles and albums available, and he was a photographer, taking pictures of the Beatles in their early days, which later were collected into the book Mike McCartney’s Early Liverpool.
He said he and his brother had moved on from using letters to communicate. “Now he does FaceTime, looking like a scruffy get,” Mike said. “He never shaves. I always say ‘you scruffy bugger’. We just talk about nothing … and everything.”
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